3 i2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



comparing types in the British Isles, we saw that everything tended 

 to show that the brunette populations of Wales, Ireland, and Scot- 

 land constituted the most primitive stratum of population in Britain. 



As to stature, a trait in which the Teuton and the Iberian 

 differ markedly from one another to-day, we have abundant evidence 

 that this neolithic population was more akin to the medium-statured 

 French than to the relatively gigantic Germans and Scandinavians. 

 The men of this epoch were not, to be sure, as diminutive as the 

 modern south Italians or the Spaniards; they seem rather to approxi- 

 mate the medium height of the inhabitants of northern Africa. 

 These Berbers and their fellows, in fact, shading off as they do into 

 the negro race south of the Sahara, we must regard as having least 

 departed from the aboriginal European type. And in Europe 

 proper the brunette long-headed Mediterranean race is but slightly 

 aberrant from it. It may have become stunted by too protracted 

 civilization, it may have changed somewhat in facial proportions, 

 but on the whole it has remained true to its ancestral image. 



III. It is highly probable that the Teutonic race of northern 

 Europe is merely a variety of this primitive long-headed type of the 

 stone age, both its distinctive blondness and its remarhable stature 

 having been acquired in the relative isolation of Scandinavia through 

 the modifying influences of environment and of natural selection. 



This theory of a relationship between the two long-headed races 

 of Europe is not entirely novel. Canon Taylor hints it under his 

 breath as a remote possibility. We affirm it as the best working 

 hypothesis possible in the light of recent investigations. It will 

 be seen at once that this theorem rests upon the assumption that the 

 head form is a decidedly more permanent racial characteristic than 

 pigmentation. In so doing it relegates to a secondary position the 

 color of the hair and eyes, which so eminent an anthropologist as 

 Huxley has made the basis of his whole scheme of classification of 

 European peoples. Dr. Brinton, and after him Keane, have like- 

 wise relied upon these traits in tracing their Aryan race to a lair in 

 northern Africa. Nevertheless, we do not hesitate to affirm that the 

 research of the last ten years has turned the scales in favor of the 

 cranium, if properly studied, as the most reliable test of race. We 

 know that brunetteness varies with age in the same individual — that 

 is one proof of its impermanence. In a preceding article * we de- 

 voted some attention to proving also that there is a factor of the en- 

 vironment in mountainous or infertile regions which operates to 

 increase the proportion of blond traits among men. We did not seek 



♦Popular Science Monthly, vol. 1, 1897, pp. 772-780; consult also Buchan, cited by 

 Beddoe, 1893, p. 10. 



